


The Worst Loneliness

by emynii, ObliObla



Series: Nia & Obli's Whumptober 2019 [26]
Category: Lucifer (TV)
Genre: Biblical Allusions (Abrahamic Religions), Character Study, F/M, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Lucifer Bingo 2019 (Lucifer TV), Pregnancy, Smut, Whumptober 2019
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-31
Updated: 2019-10-31
Packaged: 2021-01-15 05:21:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,673
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21248114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emynii/pseuds/emynii, https://archiveofourown.org/users/ObliObla/pseuds/ObliObla
Summary: She’s not certain what sin is, yet, but she knows shame. She’s always known shame.For the Whumptober prompt: abandonedFor the Lucifer Bingo prompt: Old Testament





	The Worst Loneliness

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Arlome](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arlome/gifts).

> Based on a prompt from the darling Arlome: Eve, figs, original sin, atonement
> 
> “Stab the body and it heals, but injure the heart and the wound lasts a lifetime.”  
—Mineko Iwasaki
> 
> “The worst loneliness is not to be comfortable with yourself.”  
—Mark Twain

Eve sews the fig leaves together with a sense of resignation. She’s not certain what sin is, yet, but she knows shame. She’s always known shame. The shame of not being enough, of not being who she was supposed to be. The bitterness on her tongue no amount of fruit can wipe away.

_ Not being. _

She has lived her life—or what there’s been of it thus far, at least—surviving in nothingness. Thriving in the scant darkness and misery and ruin that paradise allows her. Rubbing stinging juice into her wounds to prove she still _ is. _

Her husband won’t talk to her, not that he ever truly has, only watches her with the accusation that never leaves his face. She doesn’t hate him—though she’s tried—only looks upon him with weariness and turns away, pulling the ill-fitting garments over her ill-fitting skin, feeling the edge of vegetation slide against her thigh.

_ Her angel’s fingers slid over her hipbone, stroking gently down her leg to splay against her knee, pulling her further open to his burning gaze, to the aching warmth of his mouth, tasting of figs and salt and light and her. And she opened to him willingly, more than willingly, pressing her hips up against his face, crying out in a moment finally free from shame, though that came later, unceasing as waves beating against the shore. _

She’s shaken from memory by thunder at the edge of her hearing. The sound has come before, though it feels different, now, rumbling against her bare feet on the cool grass. Sounds like an end, not a beginning.

_ The rains first came when she did, making the rough ground softer beneath her body as she panted, trailing her hands through disheveled curls. Her angel’s breath was hot on her belly when he bowed his head to leave the indelible imprint of his lips. The water fell to her flesh like fingertips, like his fingertips, carving out pathways of brilliance and light in all her tender darkness. Dropping to slip down the peaks of her nipples and make her gasp. And he looked up at the sound. _

Her husband looks up at the sound, frowning. Their shelter is not so safe from a true storm, and she knows they both despair to be forced so close together in the cold and the damp, hair wet and dripping despondently. A flash of lightning, illuminating the more sacred night, is followed by another crack of thunder, closer now, close enough to thrum against her nerves.

_ Her angel rose, rearing like a snake but striking only gentleness, meeting her chilled flesh with his torrid heat, hands tracing the paths his tongue had made, dipping to taste her mouth, face wet from the rain, from her. She was brave, then—he’d allowed her the space to be brave—smoothing her palms down his back, feeling the muscles twitch as she clenched around his reaching fingers. She keened, high in her throat, as his teeth caught her lip and tugged, an echoing below, refracting through her body with a light purer than any Heaven ever offered. _

The lightning strikes closer than it ever has, wood flashing to ash, and they are forced into shelter. Her husband’s garments are rougher than her own, but she presses down the desire to fix, to serve, to _ complete_.

_ “You don’t have to,” her angel whispered, afraid of breaking the silence. Or perhaps it was her own fear reflected back—of discovery, of a cruel unearthing, of the terrible light of day. Pressing her hands deeper into the spongy ground, afraid of being uprooted, set adrift again, thirsting for something she didn’t even understand. But his hands were grounding, cradling her head, tight but not constricting on her hip. “But I want to,” she whispered back. _

She begins to fear a flood as the rains beat down, as the thunder grows louder and louder, the sky cruelly brilliant with incessant lightning. There has never been such a thing before, but she imagines the rivers rising and rising, sweeping her up in the current, leaving her drowning against such power.

_ She had forgotten, in her ecstasy, that he was less experienced than she was, as much as what she had counted for anything when it was so lacking in the grace he expressed in every motion. He knew her pleasure by touch and by taste, by sight and by sound, but of his own he knew nothing. She’d never found joy in this, but, when she took him in hand, his head fell heavy between her breasts and he sighed in simple sensation. _

Her husband sighs in frustration, both of them soaked and miserable, and she feels, again, the desire to comfort, paired with the uncertainty that has always tainted her life, that leaves her more adrift than all the waters that could ever rise. That the things she wants are hers alone, not torn from another’s flesh and bones, not even pulled up from the dust, but hers to make shine as stars or let burn into ash.

_ The rains lifted and the stars came out, illuminating her angel’s edges with a soft sheen that seemed his birthright even as he struggled to maintain his control. Yet there was no fear in his wildness, though she knew him to be untamed; it sang like starlight in her veins, and she drew on methods she had learned in more sorrowful times to bring finer joy. He whined and growled and breathed through flared nostrils, before he hissed in a breath and touched his fingertips to her mouth in supplication. “What do you desire?” he asked, and the words reached into her chest to unlock her most sacred parts, so deep they were a secret even to her. “You.” _

“Where are you?” something asks with a voice like the earth shaking under her feet, like the refined essence of the thunder that stopped upon its command. And she knows that voice in her marrow, a cruel echo of the one she knew in the night, wrapped more in empyreal fire than in starlight. Their creator. And her husband is braver than she gave him credit for, or more foolhardy, stepping out into the gloom. “I heard your voice in the garden, and I was afraid.”

_ “Do not be afraid,” her angel murmured, taking her hand away and pressing himself to her instead. She wondered if his words were meant for her or for himself, and she leaned up to press a kiss to his lips in reassurance. She spread her legs further, and he edged forward, eyelashes fluttering as she moaned. He reached down to chase away any pain, though there was none, was only the flush of a feeling not of completion, but of contentment, and it was sweeter still for the knowledge that it was desired but not required. He kept his eyes open, watching her shudder, and she clutched at his shoulders, feeling the glorious heat of his flesh under her hands. _

“I found I was naked and I hid myself,” her husband says, cringing and supplicating. He wants her to join him, she knows, but she stays in the shelter, whatever use it is. Their creator seems angry, now, and its words twist into her heart to settle there. “Who told you that you were naked?”

_ “You are beautiful,” her angel said fervently. “Your skin and your hair, your eyes and your soul.” She felt herself blush, though still not from anything like shame, as he moved within her, carefully, but not without urgency, sweet on her tongue as the sweat on his brow. He pressed deeper, and she cried out, grasping for the edge, digging her fingernails into his back and dragging them down his spine. He moaned and jerked forward, pulsing, spilling into her a heat more refined than any she had ever felt before. _

She feels a terror sharper and more refined than any she has ever felt before, beating with her pulse as her husband stammers and stutters, trying to explain the inexplicable. “It was _ him,” _ he yells, eventually. “That… serpent!” How much hatred he feels for her angel, though not for what _ they _have done. No, he hates him because he fears him, because he fears all of them. “He tempted her,” he says, “and she succumbed.” The force of their creator’s focus lands on her, and she feels like she’s falling.

_ She had often been left like this, seeking her pleasure but having it denied. Her angel was spent, and she expected him to pull away, as her husband did when he left his own completion painting her thighs. But he only pressed his fingers to her again, drawing out another high, and held her on that edge, clenching and pulsing with anticipation. And then she was falling, but there was a warm welcome in his arms. _

They have fallen, but there is no warm welcome for them. Curses are thrown at them, at _ her, _ for all of her transgressions. And now she knows sin, now she knows _ her _ sin, but she still doesn’t understand why. She can’t. After all, she didn’t really eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. She only tasted the fruits of desire, and they left her wanting.

That’s what desire _ is, _ after all—the need for what cannot be had. The need for what is readily available is called greed.

And so Eve abandons desire for greed, and tells herself she’s content.

_ And so Eve abandoned greed for desire, will always abandon greed for desire, and tell herself it’s okay not to be. _

There is nothing waiting for them in the wilderness. Fruit does not hang in easy reach from trees always burgeoning with their harvest. Instead they pick meager grain from dusty soil, break open husks with rocks to feast on half-rotten flesh, and even meet the creatures her husband once named with this new thing called death. Another of their curses, it seems. And they feast on it, their more earthly bounty.

_ And when she escapes from the light to return to the wilderness, what an earthly bounty this will be. Less in grain and fruit and meat than in music, spirits, sensation. A garden of delights more infernal than celestial, but this is what she has always desired. Her angel, her devil, is and will be what she desires. She won’t be lying when she tells him she accepts him fully, but perhaps her motives will not be quite as pure as they were the first time. Perhaps she will be the one tempting him. And she will wonder if this was how he felt, in the garden, when he first saw her. _

She wonders, sometimes, as the days grow shorter and the floods come, bringing life but also bringing ruin, where her angel went. Up to his stars or back down into the darkness. In quiet moments, when her husband knaps stone and she sews garments so much warmer than fig leaves could ever be, she thinks about where she will go, when death comes for her. She isn’t sure which might hurt less.

_ She will discover that her devil was cast back down into the darkness while she was drawn up into the light. But she will find so much light in him it might burn her eyes, and there are so many shadows buried in her flesh. But none of it will seem to matter when her again young lips meet his burned ones, when she kisses the scars from his skin and leads him to his own bed. And he will be the experienced one, now, but she will still lead him, will draw him down into sheets softer than Eden’s soil, will teach herself her body again as she teaches him, as he remembers. Remembering his in turn, his hands no longer shaking as he coaxes out her pleasure. He no longer will spend himself before she reaches her own pleasure, but will drag them over the edge together. He will no longer taste of figs. _

Fruit has always been her pleasure, and she has hidden herself away to press the sun-ripened flesh of a fig hard won from the elements against her mouth. The juice drips down her chin as her teeth cut in, and she sighs with the closest thing to contentment she has left. The blood and the pain that are her curse for her transgressions ceased for a time, but now that ache redoubles between her legs, somehow crueler, more twisting, and she falls to her knees with it. Later, when her belly distends with something strange and wriggling, she looks up at the sky with curses of recrimination on her tongue. But then she sees the stars, and she calms herself, pressing her fingers where he pressed them, trying to coax pleasure from pain.

_ Pleasure and pain, she’ll discover, can be intertwined in the finest of ways. But so, too, will she come to find her oldest pains again, and there will be no pleasure in them still. She knows well what sin is, and shame is her oldest bedfellow. But she will be surprised to find it come to this bed. She’ll wonder if there truly is no escape from knowing she is not enough, is not who she’s supposed to be. When she looks in the mirror, she’ll see nothing. _

She stops recognizing her body in the pools of still water she gazes into. Her husband tells her someone will explain, another angel will come down from the heavens to bring peace and understanding. But no one ever does. And when she squats on a bed of musty leaves, believing she might well die from the thing tearing itself from her, she looks down, and sends all her prayers there instead. But her angel does not come to take away her pain.

_ She will forget where to send her prayers, more bitter on her tongue than underripe fruit. Not toward the stars, not into the darkness, not to the devil who will lie across the broad expanse of sheets that are so much less warm than Eden’s soil, who she’ll understand doesn’t mean to hurt her, not with his distraction or his occasional inattention. Not with the passion he’ll sometimes forget to apply, like kohl, to his face. He’ll never mean to, but he will. He will. He will. And she won’t know what to do. _

She doesn’t know what to do. There is another creature like them, now, but smaller, wrinklier, louder. It bites at her breasts with its toothless mouth, and clings with its surprisingly strong fingers. And it is of her, and of him, and she wonders, again, if this is contentment. If there is meaning in this that might sustain her. And then another comes, and she makes herself believe it. This is what she wants. This is all she wants.

_ This will be what she wants. This will be all she wants. But this is not what the devil she’ll come to understand is no longer hers will want. And he will tempt her, again. He will trick her, again. And she will fall. She already knows she is cursed, but she will wonder how deep the malediction goes. Will there be anyone left who has not abandoned her? _

Her son comes up out of the fields, blood on his hands, and this thing called death has never felt so real. He pleads, he prays, he supplicates, but when the creator comes again—the voice that has not come since the garden, since the curse, since the fall—he tries to conceal his sin. But there is no hiding, and a curse is set upon him. And she watches him, and _ they _watch him as he turns to walk away, 

_ And Eve still won’t understand. After all, she’s only ever tasted the fruits of desire, and they’ve only ever left her wanting. _

_ But for what? _


End file.
